Video Noise Won't Go Away -- Even When It Isn't There

May 5, 1985|By Debbie del Condo

I think I've come up with my first complaint about the video genre. It's a little like the old complaint you hear from Bang and Olufsen component geeks -- that videos put pictures into your head when you would rather invent your own pictures.

My complaint is that videos put sounds into your head.

Whenever I hear Tom Petty's ''Don't Come Around Here No More'' on the radio, I fully expect to hear a little yelp at the end of the song -- because that yelp is in the video. Feeb that I must be, that's what I hear when the song plays on the radio.

Noise pollution also happens in the video for ''Voices Carry'' by 'til tuesday. In this video, singer Aimee Mann is hassled by her Wall Street-type boyfriend for being a punkette in a band.

During the instrumental bridges in the song, the chumpy boyfriend growls a couple of really sensitive remarks like ''What's with the hair?'' and ''You know, this little hobby of yours has gone too far.''

The video is pretty good, apart from its slightly implausible plot (what the heck is she doing with him?). But I resent mentally hearing its dialogue every time I listen to the song on the radio. In fact, for my taste, it's a bit too much like the Twisted Sister videos (''I Wanna Rock'' and ''We're Not Gonna Take It'') in which the apoplectic character barks out his taco-brain orders.

Eric Clapton's ''Forever Man'' comes with a subtle, spiffy video. It has a high-tech look based on steely gray colors, haze and spotlights -- sort of a Video Encounters of the Spielberg Kind.

Shot in a sound stage as big as a hangar, the video shows Slowhand and the other musicians and singers performing the song while a Mission Control video crew goes through its paces. Cameras pan and track and swirl around the performers, inevitably taping one another. Nine cameras were reportedly used to make this video.

It ends up looking a little like a how-videos-are-made documentary, not unlike Phil Collins and Philip Bailey's video for ''Easy Lover,'' but less hokey.

Be sure to watch closely towards the end of the video, and you'll see one of the cameras topple off its mount as technicians react with horror. We're looking at serious videorealism.

She's cool, no question about it, but she's hot. I'm talking about Sade, the gorgeous jazzy singer with the icy facial expression -- a little like the expression plastic surgeons advise their patients to adopt once they've had a facelift, so as not to disturb the results.

''Smooth Operator,'' the song, is all over the airwaves like a sigh, and ''Smooth Operator,'' the video, is all over the television like a grease smudge. It's a marginally acceptable performance/conceptual attempt, with leaky colors and blurry production values that are far short of the mark.

This Sade-istic offering looks like a ninth-generation copy of a badly made home movie. It's a junky Xerox of a not-too-clever video.

Boy, I just hope that Sade's sultry voice and haute-couture looks will inspire some videomaker to provide this chanteuse with a quality video. She needs a smoother operator.